Category Archives: outreach

Building on the success of CUL’s digital preservation roadshow kit, the Oxford fellows have begun assembling a local version. The kit is a mixture of samples of old hardware, storage technology, quiz activities, and general “digital preservation swag”.

Pens, pins, and a BBC Micro

We were able to trial run it as part of a GLAM (Gardens, Libraries and Museums) showcase at the Weston Library this January. Among the showcase attendees’ favourite items was an early floppy disk camera (c.1998) and our BBC Micro Computer (1981).

Sony Digital Mavica (MVC-FD7)

Technical Fellow James Mooney at the Oxford GLAM Showcase

Our floppy disk camera was among the first in the Mavica “FD” series from Sony. Sony produced 3.5” floppy disk cameras from late 1997 until 2002 (when it moved on to Mavica for CD). MVC-FD7 takes 8-bit images which can be easily transferred to a home computer. This is one of the reasons that the Mavica FD series was so popular – the FAT12 file system and wide spread adoption of 3.5″ floppy disk drives in computers made transfer a simple and quick task.

It is easy to forget that the floppy disk camera is really the grandfather of the microSD card!

The BBC Micro is well known by most British people who went to school in the 1980s and ’90s – but even today some UK classrooms will feature a BBC Micro for more nostalgic reasons. The BBC Microcomputer series was design and built by Acorn for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Most schools in the UK adopted the system, and for many children the BBC BASIC programming language was the first one they learnt.

There is to this day a cult following of BBC Micro educational games, such as Granny’s Garden (1983).

The kit will be displayed in different Oxford libraries throughout 2018 to promote the DPOC training programme and raise awareness of Bodleian Libraries’ new digital preservation policy.

As a part of the lead up to Digital Preservation Day, the Cambridge team held a series of roadshows with a pop-up exhibition to raise awareness of digital preservation within the wider University. They wanted to let people know that there was a team that was concentrating in this area. They also wanted to find out people’s concerns regarding the long term continuity of the digital content that they create and digital content they use. Outreach and Training Fellow, Lee, writes about what is in the pop-up kit and how it can be used at your institution to generate awareness of digital preservation.

The exhibition kit

In the lead up to the exhibition we created a portable carry kit that so that we could repeat the exhibition in various locations day after day.

To stimulate discussion as well as having an interactive experience, the first portable exhibition consisted of:

An A1 poster, printed on cloth for ease of carrying and to reduce wear and tear. Images attributed as correctly as possible and in line with open and creative commons requirements.

Prototype exhibition poster.

A roll-up display banner with an image sourced from the Cambridge Digital Library (appropriately from the Book of Apocalypse), plus a bit of their Photoshop skills to make a corrupted version. I like to describe the image as the digital equivalent of mould affecting a precious manuscript. You can still see the image but it’s not quite right and so work needs to be done to put to ‘right’.

A laptop with the URLs to various playable games on the Internet Archive, to make the point about emulation and how digital is different from traditional media. The games we used were:

A small collection of tangible technology from the past to the present. This was sourced from the Fellows’ collections of materials and included:

8” floppy disk

25” floppy disk

5.25” floppy disk

5.25” floppy disk drive

Compact Disc Recordable (CD-R)

Commercial double sided film on Digital Versatile Disk (DVD)

Digital Versatile Disk ReWritable (DVD-RW)

A Hard Disk Drive 250GB from a laptop

2GB and 1GB Randow Access Memory (RAM) chips

USB stick with the hard cases removed to show the small PCB and memory chip

An SD card enclosure

A 2GB micro SD card

A micro SD card USB enclosure

An iPod c. 2012

An acetate, c. 1990, with degradation (courtesy of JISC’s Dom Fripp) to make a visual point through an analogue item about the degradation and the fragile nature of materials we are working with.

A close up of the tech on display.

As a part of future work we’d like to develop this into a more generic display kit for those who do not have the time to create such materials, but have an opportunity to run displays. When it’s up and running, this is how the display looked in the University Library’s Entrance Hall.

Roadshow display at set up in the Entrance Hall of the Cambridge University Library.

We also relied on the generous acceptance and space from the hosting venues so that we could come and visit. It was important that we toured around the site to widen the message amongst the Cambridge University community, so we visited to following venues:

Alison Richard Building – 16th November

Gordon and Betty Moore Library – 17th November

Department of Engineering Library – 20th November

University Library Entrance Hall – 21st November

Churchill College – 22nd November

Faculty of English Social Space – 23rd November

The following is a summary of some of the views captured from the Post-It notes. As it’s not part of a proper study, we removed the views that repeated each other. The most popular answer for the “what digital materials should be saved” question was ‘all’ or ‘everything’. Most thought that the Library should be responsible for the preservation of all materials and the most common challenges were money, time, and reacting to change.

Summary of Post-It note capture.

There was a lot of work put into the creation of the pop-up exhibition and it was developed carefully so that it could be used beyond the life of the DPOC project. We have created a resource that can be used a moments notice to begin the digital preservation conversation to a wider audience. We’d like to develop this kit a bit further so it can be personalised for your own outreach efforts.

Please get in touch if you would like to collaborate on this kit in the comments below or via the ‘contact us’ page.

After many months of planning it feels quite strange to us that PASIG 2017 is over. Hosting the PASIG conference in Oxford has been a valuable experience for the DPOC fellows and a great chance for Bodleian Libraries’ staff to meet with and listen to presentations by digital preservation experts from around the world.

In the end 244 conference delegates made their way to Oxford and the Museum of Natural History. The delegates came from 130 different institutions and every continent of the world was represented (…well, apart from Antarctica).

What was especially exciting though were all the new faces. In fact 2/3 of the delegates this year had not been to a PASIG conference before! Is this perhaps a sign that interest in digital preservation is on the rise?

As always at PASIG, Twitter was ablaze with discussion in spite of an at times flaky Wifi connection. Over three days #PASIG17 was mentioned a whopping 5300 times on Twitter and had a “reach” of 1.7 million. Well done everyone on some stellar outreach! Most active Twittering came from the UK, USA and Austria.

Twitter activity by country using #PASIG17 (Talkwalker statistics)

Although it is hard to choose favourites among all the Tweets, a few of the DPOC project’s personal highlights included:

Cambridge Fellow Lee Pretlove lists “digital preservation skills” and why we cannot be an expert in all areas. Tweet by Julian M. Morley.

Bodleian Fellow James makes some insightful observations about the incompatibility between tar pits and digital preservation.

Cambridge Fellow Somaya Langley presents in the last PASIG session on the topic of “The Future of Digital Preservation”.

What were some of your favourite talks and Twitter conversations? What would you like to see more of at PASIG 2018? #futurePASIG

On Wednesday 29 March, a date forever to be associated with the UK triggering of Article 50, Sarah and Lee met with CoSector’s Stephanie Taylor and Ed Pinsent in the spirit of co-operation. For those that don’t know, Steph and Ed are behind the award-winning Digital Preservation Training Programme.

Russell Square was overcast but it was great to see that London was still business as usual with its hallmark traffic congestion and bus loads of sightseers lapping up the cultural hotspots. Revisiting the University of London’s Senate House is always a visual pleasure and it’s easy to see why it was home to the Ministry of Information: the building screams order and neat filing.

We were keen to speak to Steph and Ed to tell them more about the DPOC Project to date and where we were at with training developments. Similarly, we were also keen to learn about the latest developments from CoSector’s training plans and we were interested to hear that CoSector will be developing their courses into more specialist areas of digital preservation, so watch this space… (well at least, the CoSector space).

It was a useful meeting because it gave us the opportunity to get instant feedback on the way the project is working and where we could help to feed into current training and development needs. In particular, they were really interested to learn about the relationship between the project team and IT. Sarah and I feel that because we have access to two technical IT experts who are on board and happy to answer our questions—however simple they may be from an IT point of view—we feel that it is easier to understand IT issues. Similarly, we find that we have better conversations with our colleagues who are Developers and Operations IT specialists because we have a linguistic IT bridge with our technical colleagues.

It was a good learning opportunity and we hope to build upon this first meeting in the future as a part of sustainable training solution.

Last Monday, Sarah, Edith and Lee visited the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) at their DPC Glasgow Office on University Gardens. The aim of the visit was to understand how the DPC has and will lend support to the DPOC project. The DPOC team is very fortunate in having the DPC’s expertise, resources and services at their disposal as a supporting partner in the project and we were keen to find out more.

Plied with tea, coffee and Sharon McMeekin’s awesome lemon cake, William Kilbride gave us an overview of the DPC, explaining that that they are not-for-profit membership based organisation who used to mainly cater for the UK and Ireland. However, international agencies are now welcome (UN, NATO, ICC to name a few) and this has changed the nature of their program and the features that they offer (website, streaming, event recording). They are vendor neutral but do have a ‘Commercial Supporter’ community to help support events and raise funds for digital preservation work. They have six members of staff working from the DPC Glasgow and DPC York offices. They focus upon four main areas of:

Workforce Development, Training and Skills

Communication and Advocacy

Research and Practice

Partnerships and Sustainability

William explained the last three areas and Sharon gave us an overview of the work that she does for developing workforce skills and offering training events, especially the ‘Getting Started in Digital Preservation’ and ‘Making Progress’ workshops. The DPC also provide Leadership Scholarships to help develop knowledge and CPD in digital preservation, so please do apply for those if you are working somewhere that can spare your time out of the office but can’t fund you.

In terms of helping DPOC, the DPC can help with hosting events (such as PASIG 2017) and provide supporting training resources for our organisations. They can also help with procurement processes, auditing as well as calling on the wealth of advice gained from their six members of staff.

We left feeling that, despite working as a collaborative team with colleagues we can already bounce ideas off, we had a wider support network that we could call on, guide us and help us share our work more widely. From a skills and training perspective, the idea that they are happy to review, comment and suggest further avenues for the skills needs analysis toolkit to ensure it will benefit of the wider community is of tremendous use. Yet this is one such example, and help with procurement, policy development and auditing is also something they are willing to help the project with.

It is reassuring that the DPC are there and have plenty of experience to share in the digital preservation sphere. Tapping into networks, sharing knowledge and collaborating really is the best way to help achieve a coherent, sustainable approach to digital preservation and helps those working in it to focus on specific tasks rather than try and ‘reinvent the wheel’ when somebody else has already spent time on it.

Outreach and Training Fellow, Sarah, provides some insight into some of the themes from the recent IDCC conference in Edinburgh on the 21 – 22 February. The DPOC team also presented their first poster,”Parallel Auditing of the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford’s Institutional Repositories,” which is available on the ‘Resource’ page.

Storm Doris waited to hit until after the main International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) had ended, allowing for two days of great speakers. The conference focused on research data management (RDM) and sharing data. In Kevin Ashley’s wrap-up, he touched on data champions and the possibilities of data sharing as two of the many emerging themes from IDCC.

Getting researchers to commit to good data practice and then publish data for reuse is not easy. Many talks focused around training and engagement of researchers to improve their data management practice. Marta Teperek and Rosie Higman from Cambridge University Library (CUL) gave excellent talks on engaging their research community in RDM. Teperek found value in going to the community in a bottom-up, research led approach. It was time-intensive, but allowed the RDM team at CUL to understand the problems Cambridge researchers faced and address them. A top-down, policy driven approach was also used, but it has been a combination of the two that has been the most effective for CUL.

Higman went on to speak about the data champions initiative. Data champions were recruited from students, post-doctoral researchers, administrators and lecturers. What they had in common was their willingness to advocate for good RDM practices. Each of the 41 data champions was responsible for at least one training session year. While the data champions did not always do what the team expected, their advocacy for good RDM practice has been invaluable. Researchers need strong advocates to see the value in publishing their data – it is not just about complying with policy.

On day two, I heard from researcher and data champion Dr. Niamh Moore from University of Edinburgh. Moore finds that many researchers either think archiving their data is either a waste of time or are concerned about the future use of their data. As a data champion, she believes that research data is worth sharing and thinks other researchers should be asking, ‘how can I make my data flourish?’. Moore uses Omeka to share her research data from her mid-90s project at the Clayoquot Sound peace camp called Clayoquot Lives. For Moore, benefits to sharing research data include:

using it as a teaching resource for undergraduates (getting them to play with data, which many do not have a chance to do);

public engagement impact (for Moore it was an opportunity to engage with the people previously interviewed at Clayoquot); and

new articles: creating new relationships and new research where she can reuse her own data in new ways or other academics can as well.

Opening up data and archiving leads to new possibilities. The closing keynote on day one discussed the possibilities of using data to improve the visitor experience for people at the British Museum. Data Scientist, Alice Daish, spoke of data as the unloved superhero. It can rescue organisations from questions and problems by providing answers, helping organisations make decisions, take actions and even provide more questions. For example, Daish has been able to wrangle and utilise data at the British Museum to learn about the most popular collection items on display (the Rosetta Stone came first!).

And Daish, like Teperek and Higman, touched on outreach as the only way to advocate for data – creating good data, sharing it, and using it to its fullest potential. And for the DPOC team, we welcome this advocacy; and we’d like to add to it and see that steps are also made to preserve this data.

Also, it was a great to talk about the work we have been doing and the next steps for the project—thanks to everyone who stopped by our poster!

Oxford Fellows (From left: Sarah, Edith, James) holding the DPOC poster out front of the appropriately named “Fellows Entrance” at the Royal College of Surgeons.

iPres 2016 in Bern, Switzerland was an excellent opportunity to talk to practitioners and managers in the digital preservation field and begin to talk about the DPOC project. Here is a round-up of useful ideas from the Outreach and Training Fellows, Lee (Cambridge) and Sarah (Oxford).

iPres was an excellent opportunity to share ideas and ask questions; we have made great contacts and returned to the UK full of new ideas to trial in the project. Here are some of the best outreach, training and skills-related learnings that we got out of iPres 2016:

In-house training: Keep it short and refresh it regularly. Before the conference even started, we sat down to dinner with some colleagues from the British Library and chatted about their in-house training programme. They were full of useful tips about the value of running shorter awareness training sessions. We’re hoping to have the opportunity to see some of their training in action someday.

Research data stewards: find the gaps and helping them understand the value of preserving unique research data. Jeremy York (University of Michigan) delivered a paper on measuring the stewardship gap in research data management. His research can be seen here. The most interesting result was the disparity between the importance of the research data and the intention to preserve it–research data was deemed of high value, but there were no plans to preserve the data beyond the project. The question we must ask ourselves is: what training and support can we offer to help researchers understand how (and why) to preserve valuable research data?

Technical skills in digital preservation: important or role specific? Previous NDSR residents undertook a project to establish core competencies for a digital steward. The core competencies outlined from the findings were: technical skills, professional output responsibilities communication skills, research responsibilities, project management responsibilities and knowledge of standards and best practices. The research concluded that while those were the core competencies, skills were niche and role-specific, especially technical skills. It was interesting that communication skill and knowledge of standards and best practices were two competencies often viewed as essential where technical skills were not–soft skills still matter in digital preservation. The research can be accessed here.

Outreach and training: changing office culture to promote digital preservation. Jaye Weatherburn’s (University of Melbourne) poster got Lee and I talking about the importance of creating the right office culture when starting a digital preservation programme. Getting the message out about the importance of safeguarding digital assets, translating current expertise into future roles and the importance of using different messages for faculty and students. Jaye said in her poster introduction that “it’s about migrating the attitude as well as the bits.”

Outreach: it’s an ongoing task. Workshop 12 on writing a business case had interesting discussions on outreach during breakout groups. One comment was that outreach doesn’t happen once in an organisation, but it happens all the time, forever; it happens upwards, sideways and down. Another comment was about getting staff to commit to digital preservation through showing them the value of a hybrid (physical and digital) archive; many of the skills are the same. And rather than having them in opposition, they should work together to augment each other. Many people who work with physical material (such as Conservators) will still have an important role to play with digital objects.

We’re looking forward to taking some of these learnings and applying them to our training needs assessment over the next few months. We’ll also be continuing with our outreach efforts (after all, it is always an ongoing effort) using some of the ideas suggested.

Stay tuned for more conference discussions from the Policy & Planning Fellow, Edith.